---

The road didn’t begin anywhere I could remember. It just opened beneath my boots, a thin yellow line cutting through snow like a promise someone else once made and never intended to keep. Each step came with a dry, brittle crunch, the sound of something breaking politely. The cold worked its way through the soles of my boots, climbed my ankles, and settled behind my knees like it planned to stay awhile. Abandoned trucks sat half-buried on either side, their doors ajar, rust blooming along their seams. They looked like they’d tried to leave once, stalled mid-decision, and surrendered to weather and time. I understood them more than I wanted to.

I kept walking anyway. Forward motion has a way of pretending it’s purpose.

There should probably be a disclaimer here—something about whiteout conditions, emotional exposure, the way memory lies when the temperature drops—but no one reads those when they’re already committed to being alone. Besides, I’d ignored better warnings before.

I replayed the conversation in real-time, every word arriving with the same dull thud it had the first time. I never knew what it took to make you stay. All I ever had were the wrong sentences, delivered too late or too flat, like apologies left on voicemail. I mistook restraint for dignity, silence for strength. I thought playing it cool might make me look unafraid. Instead, it just made me unreachable as you turned and walked away, your outline thinning against the horizon until even regret lost track of you.

The snow did what mirrors always do—it told the truth without mercy. It reflected not my face but your absence, stretched long and pale across the road. You leaving. Again. Always again. The wind carried the smell of old oil and wet iron from the trucks, and somewhere deep in my chest, something tightened, the way it does when grief realizes it’s not done with you yet.

So far away.

I kept climbing hurdles that existed only because I needed resistance—what-ifs, if-onlys, almosts stacked one after another. My breath burned going in, scraped coming out. Effort felt holy for a while, like punishment might substitute for change. It didn’t. The road stayed long. The sky stayed heavy. I began to feel assembled rather than whole—a jalopy of a man, parts borrowed from better versions of myself, held together by habit and rust, still moving but no longer convinced of the destination.

I was the narrow space between pain and heartbreak, where neither one fully commits. I was the argument between love and sadness that never resolves. I was the darkness that shows up after the tears have dried, when there’s no audience left and no reason to perform resilience.

You were the one thing that made the cold feel survivable.
You are the one thing I couldn’t hold onto.

The trucks watched me pass, their empty windshields clouded, patient. They knew how this ended. They’d lived it. I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn back. Some days don’t offer redemption or clarity—only distance, widening with every step.

So far away.

And still, I walked.

Author’s Note

This piece was written for a convergence of daily creative challenges—FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day—each acting less as a constraint and more as a pressure point. The image set the weather. The prompts supplied the friction. What followed was written in one pass, close to real-time, without smoothing the edges or rescuing the speaker from the walk he’d already committed to.

These challenges aren’t about polish; they’re about showing up, even on disappointing days, and letting the work reveal what’s still unfinished. This one did exactly that.